Sunday writing update

[ellarien]

It's been a struggle, this week. It doesn't help that I've been reading over the completely different novel that I abandoned as a finished first draft over ten years ago, and I know I'm not writing at anything like that level of skill now. There are reasons, but I don't know how many of them are fixable; one of them may be the damage I did to my language-processing systems by moving to the US, and another is that when I was writing the first chapters of Intersection I was not working full time and had been focussed on writing for months, polishing yet another novel-length thing to a high gloss while I planned Intersection.

Intersection isn't perfect, of course. In places it's painfully obvious what I'd been reading recently; there's a very Hambly-esque musical dragon in the first section of the prologue, for example. The plot is fairly linear, with only a couple of sub-plots, and the world-building features an all-encompassing Evil Company that owns everything including -- quite openly and officially -- the government. It does have metaphor and simile and sensory detail, though, and I was mostly managing to stop the adverbial speech tags before they made it onto the page. In contrast, Behemoth 47 as currently realized looks an amateurish mess, and I have real doubts about my ability to fix it in rewrite. Still, I've come this far and I might as well push on to the end.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

amateurish mess sound just like my current WIP! However, I'm bashing on with it and taking the approach that as it's already a hopeless case, then I can practice my novel structoring skills on it. At the moment these are more or less non-existent, despite the fact that I fancy myself a novelist rather than a short story writer.

If in the end it doesn't work, then it's not to much of a loss because I'll have learned a lot and I'm not going to do the time-consuming sentence level polishing unless and until I have something reasonable to polish. :)

[ellarien]

Learning to write novels by trial and error is so slow, that's the trouble! I wouldn't know where to start with a short story, though, so I'm pretty much stuck with it. (I think my natural length is somewhere between 20K and 40K, but it's easier -- if more time-consuming -- to go longer than shorter.)

Thanks for the perspective!

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

*cheering you on*

[ellarien]

Thanks!